Efar Since the coronavirus first arrived in Europe, the European Commission has been pouring petrol on its own reputation. At the end of last week, the bureaucrats running the Commission finally ignited the metaphorical contest and transformed the entire European project into the fires of their own incompetence.
For the past five years, the British and Irish governments have been at loggerheads over Brexit. The same goes for leaving and remaining in the UK itself. The militant wings of Protestant trade unionism and Catholic separatism in Northern Ireland meanwhile literally waged war for most of the last century. And yet, within a few hours on Friday, the European Union managed to unite all these factions as opposed to itself.
The Commission (the executive of the European Union) is panicking about how far the EU has fallen behind both the United Kingdom and the United States in the race to vaccinate the public. Because the EU did not place any orders for the vaccine from suppliers three months after the British government did so, Europeans are now watching millions of vaccine doses manufactured in Europe being sent across the channel to Britain.
Pfizer and AstraZeneca, which both manufacture large quantities of the vaccine in Europe, are contractually obliged to fulfill their commitments to the government of her majesty before prioritizing EU contracts, which were purchased much later. Ironically, it seems that the European Union is ‘at the back of the line’.
The Commission on Friday announced its plans to rectify this situation through export controls. Restrictions will be placed on Pfizer and AstraZeneca’s ability to ship vaccines to countries outside the EU. Violation of the principle of free contract with retroactive effect in this way would have been bad enough in ordinary times. But in the current circumstances, such a plan is simply unscrupulous. The Commission essentially threatened Britain with a vaccine blockade at a time when hundreds of vulnerable Britons are dying of COVID-19 every day.
And it’s getting worse.
In order to put its export controls in place, the EU intended to activate Article 16 of its withdrawal agreement with the United Kingdom. Article 16 is a type of breakage glass in case of emergency relating to Northern Ireland. This will enable the EU to set up customs infrastructure at the Irish border (the only land border between the UK and the EU) in the event of an extreme emergency. The Commission clearly considered its own inability to procure sufficient doses of the vaccine as such an emergency, as it indicated that it intended to establish the relevant export controls across the Irish border.
To understand the depravity of this move, one must appreciate the EU’s political use of the Irish border during the Brexit negotiations that have consumed half of the past decade. EU negotiators have repeatedly stated that the requirement of regulatory controls at the Irish border would be an act of utmost irresponsibility. This would jeopardize the much-desired peace in Ireland by bringing Northern Ireland’s constitutional status back to the forefront of Irish thought, and restraining dormant terrorists in the process. The EU has used the widespread popularity of the open border in Ireland to push for the UK’s perpetual submission to the EU’s regulatory and customs regime. Since Northern Ireland had to remain in line with the Republic of Ireland (an EU Member State) to ensure peace, and because Northern Ireland is in the United Kingdom, the whole of the United Kingdom had to remain within the EU regulatory framework after all the institutions that write the regulations. This curriculum is so fatally flawed that even the EU itself did not really believe it, as I wrote about it. It was a cynical political play used in an attempt to first annex the whole of the UK bureaucratically and then, once it failed, only Northern Ireland. No invasive armies, just invasive regulations: a softer kind of tyranny.
That the clergy of the EU last week thought of violating the holy shibboleth of ‘peace on the island of Ireland’, with the first sign of political trouble, is a welcome development. It exposed the wonderful game of political football that they have been playing with that battered country for years and that, please, God, may never play again.
Fortunately, the Commission’s disturbed apparatus chicks did not announce their planned export controls sooner than the whole civilized world descended on them like a ton of inadequately regulated bricks. The respective Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland immediately warned the Commission of their anger, while Arlene Foster, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, called the plan “an act of aggression”. Tony Blair, former prime minister and one of Brexit’s most ardent opponents, called the EU’s ‘very stupid’, and the International Chamber of Commerce actually wrote a letter to EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen , written to reconsider her and to spell out the disparate catastrophes that could result from the disruption of global vaccine supply chains. The Spectator has compiled a list of tweets from the European Union’s most outspoken supporters, who strongly condemned the Commission’s actions. The composition is amazing to read, but perhaps not as amazing as this exciting editorial from The observer, which up to this point has been a pro-EU article. The leave vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum won 52-48 percent. If the referendum were held again today, the leave margin of victory would probably increase significantly.
By Saturday, the Commission had resigned, calling its original plan a ‘blunder’. British Trade Secretary Liz Truss told the BBC that Boris Johnson’s government had “the European Union’s assurance that the contracts will not be disrupted.” She added: ‘We are delighted that the EU concedes that the Article 16 call has been made. . . because the border in Ireland was a mistake and they are not going to continue with it now. . . . It is essential that we keep our borders open and that we resist vaccine nationalism and that we resist protectionism. ”
It is worth first considering how the European Union came to such an obviously disastrous decision in the first place. In every step of the EU’s response to COVID, we see not only individual incompetence (though there is enough), but the consequences of a technocratic, centralizing, directing ideology, which has played itself out in such a way that the endemic shortcomings are exposed. of the whole European project.
When the coronavirus first appeared in the Western world last spring, the Commission allowed four EU member states – Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands – to lead negotiations with potential suppliers. In June, however, Von der Leyen and her health commissioner, Stella Kyriakides, changed their minds about this approach.
Their reasons were not medical, scientific or logistical. They were political. Von der Leyen wanted to involve all 27 EU member states in centralized negotiations on vaccine procurement to demonstrate the unity and solidarity of the EU internal market. These negotiations were awkward and brought to a halt. The EU AstraZeneca contract negotiated by the German, French, Italian and Dutch delegations was ready for signature in June. Von der Leyen’s ideological U-turn on negotiation tactics halted the signing until August. During the intervening three months, AstraZeneca was delivering tens of millions of doses at the door of 10 Downing Street. The vulnerable Europeans who are not numbered are now six meters down because Von der Leyen and her fellow Euro-federalists are married to a grandiose vision of dehydrated Belgians, Greeks and Lithuanians walking hand in hand in a post-COVID -era who sings ‘We Are the World’.
The whole point for the EU was that the pale globalized benevolence of an outdated Bonapartist technocracy would be a greater blessing to humanity than the liberal democratic nation-state. But the rapid regulatory freedom of a British post-Brexit and the contrasting sclerosis of the emerging European superstate have brought about a state of affairs in which thousands of vulnerable people in Britain live who would be dead if they lived on the mainland. The EU’s ‘founding fathers’ – men like Altiero Spinelli and Jean Monnet, who wanted to save the world from democracy – would have been horrified.
The Commission has tried to shift the blame for the failure of vaccination in Europe on the drug companies themselves. Von der Leyen pointed the finger last week at the technical problems AstraZeneca had with the yields of vaccines in their European production facilities. “The companies have to deliver,” she said. When asked about Von der Leyen’s complaints during an interview with the Italian newspaper La Republica, Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca, was a bit confused. He noted that the UK, US and Australia all had similar yield issues. But ‘the UK contract was signed three months before the EU contract’, he said, ‘so we had an extra three months with the UK to rectify all the mistakes we were experiencing.’ In other words, the European Union has no one but itself. Von der Leyen’s decision to suspend Europe’s COVID response for three whole months to turn it into a cosmetic stage on its way to a United States of Europe costs Europeans their lives every day.
The EU’s disastrous response to COVID and its untouched but momentary flirtation with a medical blockade should perhaps be seen as a warning to those of us who shy away from the populist turn in American politics. The European Union is an experiment in antipopulism. Its institutions were conceived and built to isolate those who wield political power from the will of popular majorities in the modern world as far as possible. If populism were the source of our current discontent, we should expect the EU to look like a shining city on a hill. But it is clear that these people do not have the faintest, funniest idea what they are doing on earth. Finally, in today’s world there is simply no important political question to which the European Union is the answer.
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Originally published